


the tinder in my father's house

by tomato_greens



Series: Guesthouse Best House [3]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Addiction, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-25 20:34:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21981487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: Five times Jack had daddy issues, and one time he...uh, still had them.(Ah! The joys of parenting.)
Relationships: Eric "Bitty" Bittle/Jack Zimmermann
Series: Guesthouse Best House [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1283549
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	the tinder in my father's house

**Author's Note:**

> 1) WARNING: This 'verse deals with well-meaning adults who love each other but whose marriage is complicated and flawed, and who make imperfect parenting decisions; one of the POV characters has unpleasant and occasionally violent intrusive thoughts; mental illness, addiction, misogyny, and homophobia occasionally crop up; two characters are on the spectrum, only one person is diagnosed, not everyone is good at being 100% supportive of those characters; no one's a cannibal or galactic murderer or anything, but by Check Please conventions I guess it's a little dark.
> 
> 2) Title is from Julien Baker's song [Everybody Does](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlVp9W6LvTQ), which when I outlined this fanfic in 2016 I thought was about daddy issues but have only just this minute realized might be about Jesus? Oops.
> 
> 3) Please consider this fic a repository for scenes from a fanfic novel I don't have the time or stamina to finish. Yeah, there's a plot, but basically it's just: Jack is an addict; he and Bitty eventually have two kids; marriage is hard so sometimes Bitty makes Jack live in their guesthouse. For the record, the Long John Silver's mpreg [threesome](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7987087/chapters/20579906) [fics](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7987087/chapters/22806605) are from an AU of this AU, lmaooooo. 
> 
> ETA: ACTUALLY I think this fic DOES have some semblance of a structure, thank god.

The baby comes early.

“Well, her mother is practically a crack whore, what should we have expected?” Bitty sniffs, his right hand in a vise grip around the gear shift and his left clutching white-knuckled onto the steering wheel. Bitty always drives when they’re in the car together. He’s a maniac at the best of times so Jack ends up with his hands around his seatbelt and beset by visions of their imminent death, but Bitty gets them to the hospital safely enough, screechingly double-parks, and pulls Jack behind him into the maternity ward.

Krystal, the sixteen-year-old crack whore, is still mid-push when they get there. Bitty’s eyes immediately fill with tears, either at the miracle of life or at being forced to look at a vagina. Jack has seen some number of vaginae, but not recently, and anyway none so bloody or stretched so far open. The human body’s capacity is impressive and bizarre. 

After the baby’s head crowns, Krystal shoots out a hand, clearly looking for something to grab onto. Bitty is closer, but he pushes Jack towards her in a panicky shove, so Jack puts his palm on hers. 

“Thanks,” she huffs. Her face is sweaty and red, creased from pain. Little curlicues of blonde hair wisp out around her face; one’s caught in her silver earring, a tiny gleaming stud she probably got when she was twelve or thirteen. Jack is having a daughter. He has to know these things now. Krystal looked older the first time they met her, eyeliner out to her ears and her belly just beginning to show, but from this angle she’s practically a child. Jack wonders where her parents are. He wishes Bitty hadn’t called her a whore. 

Krystal’s waived all of her parental rights but they can’t take the birth from her, although Bitty probably would if he could. Jack doesn’t understand Bitty’s seething and proprietary jealousy over their daughter, or why he’s still furious that Jack said yes to the open adoption. Anyone looking can see that Ophélie—that’s going to be her name, Ophélie-Thérèse—will be Bitty’s child. 

“One big one, now,” the doctor says, and Krystal screws up her face, crying out in some awful, primordial tongue, with a singular push turning Bitty’s thousands of hypothetical children into one real little girl. Jack is surprised to find that she’s loud and also beautiful. 

As soon as the umbilical cord is cut, everybody begins crying in earnest: the baby, Bitty, Krystal. When some faceless nurse takes her away to clean and evaluate her, Bitty immediately starts shrieking—“Krystal, you know that wasn’t in the birth plan, why didn’t you say something?” Krystal ends up crying even harder while she delivers the placenta, so by the time a nurse bustles Ophélie back to the room, Bitty’s obviously fuming and Krystal is dripping mascara down her nose. The nurse looks at both them disapprovingly and hands the baby to Jack.

Jack wants to die on contact; it’s convenient, because Bitty is going to kill him for getting to touch Ophélie first. She’s so small she could slip through the gap between his elbow and his ribcage. The image of her smashed body comes to him unbidden. He wishes he were normal. Normal people probably don’t think about these awful things the first time they hold their newborn children. 

“Give me that baby,” Bitty says, clearly greedy for her. Jack hands him Ophélie gratefully, and Bitty’s whole body curls around her. In his arms she looks less infinitely breakable, just delicate. A perfect little replica of a person. Bitty brushes her soft little cheeks with his nose, rubs her fine golden hair with his thumb and forefinger. “Jack,” he says, starting to cry again. 

“I want to hold her,” Krystal announces. Jack wonders for a moment whether he was that whiny when he was sixteen, but decides he probably was: his mother had told him to calm down a lot and he’d never even had to deal with giving birth in front of two gay men and a dispassionate coterie of nurses. 

“Hang on,” Bitty says, sounding annoyed. “We’re having some skin-to-skin contact.”

Someone must have given Krystal a tissue, because she blows her nose loudly and coughs twice. “I want to hold my baby.”

Bitty hisses out a stream of breath from between his gritted teeth. He looks like a starving animal glaring out from some dirty cave, the baby clutched tightly to his chest.

“Your baby,” Krystal amends snottily. 

“I can’t believe this,” Bitty mutters to Jack, whose first instinct is to shrug and whose second instinct is to hightail it out of the hospital, into the car, and directly into a ditch. Since that’s not the kind of thing he does anymore, he puts his hand on Bitty’s shoulder, a get-out-of-jail-free gesture that Jack uses when he can’t puzzle out what Bitty wants from him. It works pretty well. Bitty’s desires are usually articulate enough for them both. 

“Fine.” Bitty’s face is icy, and it takes him a full thirty seconds and two aggressive throat-clearings by Krystal of before he lets go of the baby.

“I’m not a fucking babysnatcher—”

“Don’t swear where she can hear you!”

“—I didn’t even buy any diapers, Jesus,” Krystal finishes over Bitty’s increasingly frantic pantomime. “They’re way more expensive than I thought they’d be. I just want to, like, hold her somewhere other than my uterus.”

Bitty’s face shifts into an incomprehensible pained slant, and Jack is visited by the urge to put his arms around Bitty, to shield him from the sweaty, bloody reality of Krystal’s uterus. But even though everyone in this room must know that Bitty and Jack have swapped every bodily fluid there is, he can't bring himself to do it. 

The baby starts squirming around. They’d never talked, Jack realizes as Krystal pulls down her hospital gown and it begins to happen in front of him, about nursing—Bitty and he spent an entire day picking out a dozen BPA-free baby bottles, but they’d never asked Krystal about what she’d do. Jack has seen breast pumps online. He can’t imagine wanting one latched onto him. Then again, he can’t imagine a baby latched onto him either.

“This ain’t your first time around the block, I can tell,” Bitty drawls out, his vowels extra syrupy. Jack does not like when Bitty uses this voice.

“My mama showed me how when she found out I was pregnant,” Krystal says, face very still and hard. “In case I kept her.”

Bitty draws himself up to his full height. “But you didn’t keep her.” 

“No,” Krystal agrees, shifting Ophélie a little bit, her arms already moving with a subtle expertise Jack somehow recognizes from his own mother. He can’t imagine having a grip so sure. 

Bitty crosses his arms around himself, presumably so that he doesn’t rip Ophélie from Krystal’s arms and escape to some palatial retreat in a country with no extradition treaty to the U.S. Jack doesn’t think he’d like any of the food in Uzbekistan, so he’s glad Bitty’s restraining himself. Eventually they have to go home—“Or at least let Mom and baby sleep,” a nurse says, so forcefully no-nonsense that even Bitty doesn’t try to argue his way out of it—and they end up passing out in the car, still in the hospital parking lot, Jack’s elbow cranked dangerously around the emergency brake. 

“I can’t believe I’m going to bring home my child in yesterday’s clothes,” Bitty sighs once their alarm goes off, brushing his limp hair away from his face. In the watery morning sunlight, Bitty looks thin, swimming in his argyle and khaki. Jack wonders whether it’s a trick of his exhaustion or whether Bitty’s been losing weight. He wants to take out his phone and check Bitty’s face against the many pictures of Bitty he keeps in his camera roll, but that would be inappropriate. 

“At least if she gets sick on you, it won’t matter,” Jack points out.

Bitty pulls a face. “It’s dirty.” 

Jack doesn’t know what to say. Babies are dirty: he’s read over and over again how dirty they are, heard his own mother’s horror stories about the mouthful of urine he’d once shot at her during a diaper maneuver. But then again newborns don’t have much in the way of immune systems, so maybe Bitty is right, maybe they should have gone home and changed. It’s too late now, though. The baby’s born. They both smell like sweat and hospital. 

No one prepared Jack for the way newborns smell, the strange and particular sweetness of their hair. Twenty-four hours ago Ophélie was covered in the remnants of Krystal’s viscera, but now she’s so soft and clean that holding her is unsettling; Jack keeps worrying that his calluses will catch on her cheeks or that in tucking her under his arm his inevitable pit stain will taint her forever. Bitty, on the other hand, seems to have transcended beyond perspiration. 

“I can’t wait for a cigarette,” Krystal confides to Jack as Bitty takes his turn signing the birth certificate, balancing the newly official Ophélie-Thérèse Suzanne Zimmermann-Bittle on one hip as he does so. 

“Smoking isn’t good for you,” Jack points out. Bitty looks like a self-sustaining system. This, too, is unsettling—Jack has for many years thought of himself as a necessary satellite, but Bitty, flushed with the glow of new fatherhood, looks perfectly fulfilled. 

“It’s been six months since my last one, give me a break,” Krystal moans. She rattles the side of the bed, gently; her nails are bitten short and her pink polish is chipped. 

“I wish you hadn’t smoked early on in the pregnancy,” Bitty says, his voice harsh as he hands Jack the birth certificate. “Don’t you understand—”

“Yes! I know! Asthma and a cleft palate! I know from that pamphlet you made me read about four times.” Krystal subsides, her arms crossed over her chest, pouting.

“Well,” Bitty sniffs, “you’re just lucky her palate is safely connected, because—”

“What, you wouldn’t have taken her if she weren’t perfect?” Krystal asks, venomous. 

Bitty turns his back on her, bobbing Ophélie gently and murmuring to her, just barely audible: “Don’t listen to her, you’re perfect, you’d always be perfect no matter how you came out—”

In all honesty, Jack is just as glad she came out with a fused palate, and he thinks Bitty probably is too. The scar from a surgery like that would never fade completely, and according to the online parenting forum Shitty recommended to him, life is hard enough for girls with merely average upper lips. Muscles slippery with a strange relief, he signs his name to the birth certificate in the box labeled PARENT #2. 

The drive home from the hospital is nerve-wracking—Bitty crawls along five miles under the speed limit, refusing at any point to go onto a main thoroughfare in case an eighteen-wheeler has a bad day. It’s just as well since Jack hates the highway, but he’s cramped in the back next to the strapped-in baby carrier, knees up around his ears. Ophélie must have used up all her energy crying and blinking up at Krystal and Bitty in the hospital because she’s asleep, her little eyelashes fluttering and her little tummy expanding and contracting with every tiny breath she takes. Jack has an intense urge to put his hand on her belly and feel the tangible proof of her breath, but he’s afraid he’ll wake her up.

They’ve been driving in a nearly prayerful silence, but Bitty must notice Jack’s sudden tension because he glances into the rearview mirror and asks, “You okay, hon?” 

It’s the first time all day Bitty’s addressed Jack about anything other than the baby; Bitty is usually so attentive to Jack’s needs that this comes, in retrospect, as a shock. “I think so,” Jack says, to avoid an outright lie. Bitty doesn’t like Jack to lie to him, but he also doesn’t like Jack’s anchorless bad moods, prefers only to be told about Jack’s grievances when they come tied to an obvious cause. The only obvious cause for Jack’s current anxiety is the baby, which Bitty will certainly not want to hear.

At the next red light, Bitty reaches into the backseat, his palm up. Jack takes his hand. The little whuff-whuffs of Ophélie’s breathing takes on a hypnotic quality. “We have a baby,” Jack says.

“Yeah, we do,” says Bitty, and withdraws his hand as the light turns green.

They get home; Ophélie stays asleep for the first hour, a warmly content bundle they don’t dare take out of her car carrier. Forty-five minutes in, Bitty looks down at himself and blanches—“I need a shower,” he explains, a sick look on his face. “I can’t be in this skin anymore.”

“Okay,” Jack says.

“You’re going to be fine with the baby?” Bitty asks, resting one hand on the crook of Jack’s elbow. The fine blond hairs on Bitty’s knuckles glint in the light from the window. “I’ll just be fifteen minutes.”

“We’ll be okay,” Jack promises, potentially a lie. 

Ophélie doesn’t wake up until the shower upstairs has stopped and Bitty’s habitual getting-dressed Beyoncé medley floats down the stairs. She opens her little eyes and stares straight at Jack for several seconds before she registers she’s no longer in a womb. Her faces creases and she starts to wail.

“No, no, no,” Jack says, getting frantic as he unbuckles the carrier and lifts her into his arms. She’s unbelievably small, smaller than Krystal, who with her dirty hair and in her hospital gown had seemed like the smallest person Jack had ever seen in his life, smaller than Lardo, smaller than the kids Jack coached in peewee hockey. Intellectually, this seems obvious: Ophélie is barely a day old, and only seventeen inches long, smaller than Jack’s cousins’ American Girl dolls. But somehow Jack didn’t realize that would mean Ophélie would fit into one arm, her head not yet the size of a softball and her feet hardly bigger than Jack’s thumb. 

“Tais-toi, tais-toi,” he mumbles to her in French. This is what his mother used to say to him when he had meltdowns as a kid, limited in her vocabulary to whatever she’d picked up from that week’s Ent’Cadieux. Ophélie doesn’t listen to him. She doesn’t understand language yet. Well, neither did Jack when he was eight and destroying every thousand-dollar piece of furniture he could get his hands on. Like father like daughter. It sounds like something Bitty would say. 

Meanwhile Ophélie is still bawling. Jack wonders what she could want or need. He runs through the list he prepared months ago, an infant-appropriate variant of his own list he uses whenever he feels like breaking down—diaper change? Food? Existential malaise? The diaper seems clean, which is a twofold miracle; what would Bitty have done if Jack got to change her first diaper? But then Jack realizes he might have to give her the first bottle, which is probably worse, since it’s a lot easier to fantasize about feeding a child than cleaning up her literal shit. 

“Dodo, l’enfant, do,” Jack starts singing, not so much because he wants her to sleep as because it’s the only song for children he can remember off the top of his head. Then again, if she were sleeping, Jack could put her back down into her carrier without guilt. A few days ago Bitty was practicing the formula process one-handed, but Jack never got around to it, or it seemed unnecessary, or something. With Ophélie screaming in his ear, he regrets, more deeply than he regrets almost anything, his lack of foresight. He pulls a sterilized bottle from the cupboard and is briefly grateful that neither of them ever had to be pregnant; it was so much easier to get the house ready without an extra belly getting in the way.

Jack stares at the bottle. “Désolé,” he apologizes to Ophélie, and sets her down on the eternally lemon-fresh counter so that he can mix formula with both hands. He gets the cap screwed on, and, looking back at the redly indignant baby over his shoulder, he heads over to the microwave. Should he have brought her with him? She can’t flail off the counter, can she? It’s too late; the bottle’s in. 

“What are you doing!” Bitty yells from the doorway, fresh-faced and wet—usually one of Jack’s favorite Bitty looks. His is face is red, too, like it is when they’re fucking, but instead of tenderly sticking two fingers down Jack’s throat, he pushes past Jack and grabs the baby from the counter, kissing her on the forehead and getting down a new bottle from the cupboard in one fluid motion.

“I already—” 

“You’re using the microwave,” Bitty says coldly, mixing formula, grabbing Jack’s hand and using it as a vice while he screws on the top to the bottle, then running hot water from the sink and sticking the bottle under it. Ophélie watches with wide-eyed confusion, whimpering more quietly now although her face is still streaked with tears. “You could have burned her. She could have fallen and died.” 

Jack imagines against his will that his body has cracked down the middle, his guts hanging pendulously between his legs in deflated shame. “Okay,” he says. 

In a dangerous voice, Bitty repeats, “Okay?” 

Bitty’s waiting for something else, but Jack doesn’t know what; he’s distracted by the hot, squeamish weight of himself. “Okay,” he says.

“You don’t take that tone with me, mister,” Bitty says, whipping the bottle out of Jack’s hand and bringing it to Ophélie’s little rosebud mouth. “Take a hike. My daughter and I need some bonding time.” 

Jack means to go—he does. But Ophélie moves her mouth ineffectually on the rubber nipple, apparently uncertain, once removed from Krystal’s bare breast, just what to do, and Jack is overwhelmed by a pulse of some previously unknowable feeling: to protect Ophélie, or teach her, or at least to put his hand under her tiny chin and purse her lips for her so she can suck in some goddamn formula. 

“Jack,” Bitty says, so flatly and evenly that it can’t be the first time he’s said it. Jack hunches his shoulders and stands to attention, though he can’t quite meet Bitty’s eyes. “Did you hear what I said?”

“I like you without Botox better,” Jack tells Bitty’s totally serene forehead, and turns, swerving around the teakwood dining set—a monstrous twelve-seater Bitty bought with Jack’s credit card for their anniversary while Jack was scoring his three hundred ninety-ninth and four hundredth goal against the goddamn Flyers at home—and then, beyond, the sectional on the white thick pile rug—Jack had wanted something with a little more structure, maybe a midcentury with those toothpicky angled legs underneath, but Bitty had taken a look at the list of links Jack e-mailed him and said, “hmmmmm,” and that was that. Fuck the sectional, Jack thinks, and gives it half a hip check as he passes; it skids across the floor, leaving no mark on the hardwood. They just got the floors redone a year ago, he remembers guiltily. 

“Jack,” Bitty huffs from the kitchen.

Unbearable. Jack forcibly tucks his hands into his armpits and slows his walking down, placing each foot carefully in the confines of his last would-be footprint. Bitty hates it when he walks like this, at least in public––Jack is embarrassing. But Bitty can’t see him, and is clearly too distracted by the baby to care what Jack does. 

No; not a useful thought. Jack breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth as he mounts the stairs.


End file.
